Mullah Benjamin Gul-Shauloff

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Mullah Benjamin Gul-Shauloff was born in Herat, Afghanistan, in 1859 and died in Jerusalem in 1929. He was the son of Shaul Gul, a forced convert to Islam from Mashhad, Iran, who had found asylum and returned to Judaism in the tolerant Sunni city of Herat in 1840. Mullah Binyamin emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1894 and was one of the first Afghan Jews to settle in Jerusalem. With the aid of his brothers Israel and Nethanel, he encouraged Jews from Central Asia to come to Palestine and established an infrastructure for the absorption of immig…